The Last Call

by George Wier

  Explosions. Storms. One or the other, or possibly both were coming, bearing down upon us with all the inevitability of fate.

  “I’ve come this far,” I said, and climbed out into the herd of dogs.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  We went back to downtown Childress.

  Where were Agents Cranford and Bruce when we needed them?

  We stopped for a bite at a Sonic Drive-In on the main drag through town.

  Hank ordered for us while I made a phone call at the gas station pay phone next door.

  “Bill! I’m glad you called! I didn’t know how to get hold of you.”

  “What’s going on, Kathy?” I asked. She sounded pretty excited.

  “I found something in the State Archives. A letter. It was in the restricted stuff, so you didn’t hear it from me.”

  “Tell me,” I said.

  “It was inside an envelope with the letterhead of the Dallas Sheriff’s Office and addressed to the Governor of Texas. I think it may be a hand-written note from that guy you told me to look up.”

  “What guy?”

  “The U.S. Marshal. Blackjack.”

  “What’s the note say, Kathy?”

  “Okay. Hold on.” She put the phone down. I listened to the surface of her library counter for a minute, then she was back. “Got it. Ready?”

  “Yeah.”

  “It’s dated the eighth of September, 1926. It reads: ‘Roger, Feels like this playing both ends against the middle is going to wind me up dead. There’s a lot of money in this town, but getting close to the shine is work. These people are scum of God’s Earth, but they are sly. If I don’t hit pay dirt in a week, I’m out of this God-forsaken hell-hole. If you don’t see me in ten days after receiving this, then I’m dead. Send cavalry anyway. Best, BJ.’ That’s it. What’s it mean, Bill?”

  “It means that the cavalry got there too late, Kathy.”

  “Why do you need to know all this stuff, Bill? And why was this restricted? This stuff happened over seventy years ago.”

  “Because, darlin’,” I said. “Those were real people and they had real families, and some of those families, the sons and daughters-and most certainly the grandsons and granddaughters-are still around up here.”

  “Oh,” she said. “They could be affected by this after seventy years?”

  “Is the South still affected by the Civil War? Is Germany still affected by the Nazis?”

  “Uh. Yeah. I see your point,” she said. “By the way, where are you calling from?”

  “Childress, Texas. Kathy, this is about money, whiskey, horses and kidnapping. If I recall correctly, Roger Bailey was the Dallas Sheriff. He used to sell the bicycles that Clyde Barrow stole over in West Dallas. Sold them out of his pawn shop. This was when Clyde was still a kid, just getting his start in crime. Bailey knew what he was doing.”

  “Wow. Nice guy. Was everybody on the take back then, or not?”

  “Not everybody, Kathy, but sometimes the lines blurred.”

  “Okay,” she said. “I still don’t understand all the secrecy.”

  She had a point. I didn’t either. “Well,” I replied. “What if somebody started going around saying your grandfather made his fortune from illegal whiskey, robbery and murder-for-hire?”

  “Hah! I think maybe he did, Bill.”

  “Oh,” I said. “Sorry.”

  “That’s okay. Still, you’re right. I wouldn’t like it.”

  “Exactly. Also, I think there’s even more to it all than just hoodlumism.”

  “Yeah? Like what?”

  “Don’t know. I’ll tell you if I find out.”

  “Uh,” she said. “On second thought don’t tell me. I don’t want to know.”

  I looked up. Hank drew his hand across his throat and tapped on a non-existent watch.

  “Gotta run, darlin’,” I told her. “I’ll see you later.”

  “Um. Bill? Uh. I don’t know how to tell you this.”

  “Just spit it out.”

  “Well, okay. I don’t want to go out with you.”

  What? I thought. “I thought I was just buying you dinner. You know, friends?”

  “Oh. Okay. Good. I’m glad you thought that. It makes it easier. I still can’t.”

  “Alright,” I said. “Why?”

  “‘Cause,” she said. “What you do is too dangerous. I don’t want any part of it.”

  I paused two beats, let it sink in.

  “Good,” I said. “I always knew you were a smart girl.”

  We exchanged goodbyes and hung up.

  “Well,” I said aloud to myself. “I’ll be damned.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  After Hank, Dingo and I bolted down our food we got back on the road.

  “Turn left off the town square, Bill,” he said.

  It was getting late in the day. All of three o’clock.

  “Where’re we going?” I asked.

  “Radio Shack,” he said.

  “Sorry I asked.”

  Surprisingly the town had one.

  By four-thirty we were sitting under a shade tree down by a slow-moving creek on the outskirts of town.

  I patted Dingo and watched Hank. He was ladling some very foul-smelling raw nitrates from a large-sized trash bag into a series of small metal cylinders. I started to ask where he had gotten the cylinders, then decided against it. I didn’t need to know.

  A sheriff’s deputy car passed. I waved and the two patrolmen waved back.

  “Think they know us?” Hank asked me.

  “If they don’t then I’m willing to bet that they know of us.”

  “Remember when she told us about Carl, the jockey?” I asked Hank.

  “Yeah. And Lefty. Jake and Freddie’s fathers.”

  “Right. Well, remember when Julie said that Lefty liked to tell stories, only he-”

  “He did a bad job of it,” Hank said.

  “Uh huh. So Carl had to finish most of them. The story she told me in my office the first morning I met her was about a manure pile.”

  “What? You’re kidding.”

  “Nope. A story about a manure pile and some horse stables. At first I thought it was… Uh… Horseshit.”

  “The story,” Hank said, “not the manure. Got it.”

  “Right,” I told him. “So there was this bit of concrete poking up at the edge of the manure pile. It had a rusted out lid on it and an old padlock on top of that. All Lefty could say was that the manure pile had a ghost, and that it was the ghost of an old lawman. Carl corrected him and pointed out the concrete tube, about a foot and a half in diameter, and said it was the chimney for an old tornado shelter.”

  “Makes sense,” Hank said. “Most of these old homesteads up here on the plains have them. Go on with the story.”

  “Okay. Carl told her that a house had once stood right beside the tornado shelter, which was concrete with a steel door. In the ground on top of that was a vegetable garden. They used to fertilize the garden with horse manure. Later, after the house had been torn down and rebuilt higher up on the hill they stopped raising vegetables there. Later they built some new horse stables there-about the time that Archie Carpin was a kid-and because it was tradition, kept on dumping their manure on top of the old tornado shelter.”

  “Okay,” Hank said.

  “So, that night when Julie was on the run and Archie was coming back home, she had to ditch the money. She had Jessica-the kid-with her and all she could think of doing was getting rid of the money and getting the hell out of there. If those men had caught her with the money, she-they-would both have been dead.”

  “She got the lid open,” Hank said. “Didn’t she? The lid to the tornado shelter.”

  “Uh huh. She did. It was mostly a blob of rust. She said she got crudded-up on all the wet manure from the downpour, but she got the damn thing open-“

  ”And dropped the doctor’s bag with the money down the hole.” Hank said, pleased with himself.

  “Yea
h,” I said. “Only she didn’t know about Blackjack. After all, it was just an old jockey’s tale.”

  “Blackjack?”

  “You’ll find out,” I said. I glanced at my watch. “We’re running low on time.”

  Off to the east the line of dark clouds was much closer.

  “I know,” he replied. “It’s time to get Julie and the little girl.”

  “And the money,” I said.

  Carpin’s ranch was fifteen miles outside of town and three miles from the state highway.

  I got Dock’s Suburban up to eighty-five miles per hour and didn’t get any complaints from Hank.

  About mid-way we passed a Dodge Ram pickup that had a headache rack on top. A county vehicle. Probably Sheriff’s Office.

  I glanced in the rearview mirror, watched it slow down, turn off and whip around. It followed us for a mile or more, then slowed and pulled off to the side of the road.

  I wondered, but then decided to forget about it.

  The leaden gray leading edge of the storm front rolled and tumbled over us. Beneath it, in front of us and along the black eastern horizon, lightning forked down in brilliant trunks, searching, finding. Thunder pealed. From behind us the sun lit the land away north and east in an ethereal, orange-ish glow.

  “Gonna be one helluva storm,” Hank said.

  “Yeah. I think we should pull over and re-check our armaments,” I said.

  We were loaded for bear. I had a.38 and Hank had his.25 caliber Walther and Dingo. Also he had a backpack stuffed with little metal cylinders with walkie-talkies taped to them.

  “How’re you holding up?” Hank asked.

  “Bout as well as can be expected,” I told him, but in truth, I was more than a little nervous.

  When it comes to mortality, whether it’s your own or somebody else’s, that’s just the way it is. You feel it in your stomach, in the little nerve-endings in your hands and feet, over the sensitive skin along the spine. If I had to name the feeling, I’d call it fear.

  I wondered if Hank felt the same.

  “Let’s do this,” he said.

  I started up the car and pulled out onto the road and headed straight into the coming blackness.

  A few miles down the road from Carpin’s ranch the windshield started picking up little spatters of rain. As we advanced the drops become larger, the roadway underneath became slick. By the time we reached a large billboard that read “QUARTER HORSE RANCH” on the roadside, it was coming down in sheets, almost horizontal, right at us. I turned the windshield wipers on full. In our headlights the rain appeared to have a nexus, a central emanation point about eight feet in front of the car and about four feet above the level of the hood.

  Night had descended, and it was a night right out of some story by Sterling Hayden, or perhaps Dean Koontz. The kind of night where the weather takes on a personality all its own.

  I slowed us to a crawl. The last mile took all of five minutes, though it seemed a lot longer.

  The rain came down so fast and thick and hard all at once as we pulled off the road near the main gate that visibility was down to twenty yards, even with the wipers flogging the windshield full tilt.

  I looked at Hank.

  “Are we doing this right?” I asked him.

  “I’ve never done this before, Bill,” he said. “We’ll know soon enough. If we live through this, remind me to tell you that you did fine.”

  I put the car in park.

  “Leave the keys under the seat,” Hank said. “We may have to scoot pretty quick.”

  “How are we going in?” I asked. Really, I was asking myself.

  “Gun in hand. We go in together. You too, Dingo,” Hank said. Dingo stuck her head up front and licked Hank’s cheek.

  It was my turn to say it: “Let’s do this.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  Hank and Dingo and I crouched in a downpour at the edge of the woods near the main gate to the Carpin Quarter Horse Ranch. Thunder crashed and lightning lit up the world for brief spaces.

  I had never been so wet. The rain came down in sheets.

  The earth beneath our feet churned in the torrent of the runoff and became so much mud.

  Hank was bent low with an arm around Dingo’s neck, and even the dog tried to make herself as small as possible, pressing herself back against and underneath him in an attempt to stay out of the rain. The pack on Hank’s back was shedding water at an alarming rate. I only hoped the merchandise inside was still high and dry.

  The heart of the storm would be passing over us soon. There was one particular sheet of brilliance, there and gone in a twinkling, so bright that my retinas hurt, and even as I thought of counting forward from the flash to the peal of thunder, it seemed that a giant decided at that moment to clap his hands together behind my head.

  “Damn,” Hank shouted, “that was close.”

  In the woods to our left I saw a flicker of light. The tree that had just been hit by lightning, not twenty yards away, guttered with flame for a moment, then the flames winked out.

  “Yeah!” I yelled back.

  A hundred yards ahead through the night and the storm I could make out the dark, solid silhouette of the main house. Still no light.

  “Do you think anybody’s home?” Hank asked.

  “Your guess is as good as mine. If there are any cars, they’ll be around back.”

  Dingo barked, but it was half-hearted. A protest, probably. I was certain the dog thought we were all out of our minds, and I wasn’t so sure that she wouldn’t be right if she did. What the hell were we doing anyway? Then again, I’d been asking myself that question for most of my life.

  “The stables must be down the lane,” Hank said. “Back beyond the house. Still wish I had that map Julie drew.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Hank, I think we should split up. Like in Rio Bravo. Somebody needs to cover the back door, you know what I mean?”

  It didn’t take him long to agree, one quick scan of the lay of the land, which was darkness and quagmire, and he was nodding.

  “Okay.”

  “I’ll go left,” I told him and pointed. Toward the left there was a stand of brushy woods straining against an ancient barbed wire fence and a narrow path between the house and the woods, a black place in the night that appeared to swallow the lightning and the storm.

  I caught Hank’s look in a flash of lightning. Even he thought I was crazy. That was a switch.

  “You and Dingo go right,” I said, and pointed.

  To the right of the house the bare land rose up into a series of low hills, then fell away toward the rear of the property. Back there, somewhere, was the swelling, clay-red waters of the Red River. Also, back there somewhere were the horse stables, and beyond that, a certain manure pile.

  “You be… thorough,” Hank said.

  “I’ll be…Yeah.”

  With that Hank and Dingo were gone into the storm, vanishing completely in an instant.

  With the rain filling my shoes-by God, I’d have to get new ones soon-I set off down the fence line, peering at the ground ahead and pausing between flashes of lightning in order to keep my bearings.

  I entered the night.

  When I was all of seven years old I went with my folks to visit a neighbor lady.

  In the small town where I grew up the street lamps were thin-to-nonexistent the further you got away from downtown, and we lived within a block of the city limits. When the moon waned down to nothing, or hid itself completely, the dark spaces between and behind the homes held little more light than a limestone cave, particularly on cloudy nights.

  That night was such a night.

  After dinner and tall tales, each equally unremarkable, my mother and father said their goodbyes on the front porch while I fidgeted from foot to foot on the spaced concrete blocks that composed the front walk.

  I looked around at the ocean of night around me, the only safe shores of which was the pool of rectangular light spilling around the silhouettes
of my folks and Mrs. Beckham.

  I heard a sound; an odd sound, like a whimper. It seemed to emanate from the side of the house down near the ground, and being age seven it was up to me to investigate.

  Some of us are born curious and have the good fortune to have an inborn sense of fear and awe with which to temper it. I wasn’t so lucky. Curiosity I had, and that in spades, but until that moment in the hot high summer of 1970 in the East Texas night at Mrs. Beckham’s house at the corner of Collard Street and Maple, I had not yet learned of fear and pain from the unknown.

  Perhaps ten feet-all of a world-into the darkness, I felt for the whimper in the inky blackness.

  I moved forward. Two yards. Five.

  I smelled earth, freshly turned-the same scent as from our vegetable garden when it was being tilled-and I smelled iron, and something else. A wet smell. A reek.

  The whimper turned abruptly into a growl; a low, gravelly staccato rising in volume and intensity in the stillness of the dark. From a world away I could hear the adult voices around front, indistinguishable as words but with crystal clarity as far as tone-over there, in that other world where my parents and the old neighbor lady stood on the shores of the light, all was well. All was right with the world.

  The fear began as a little feathery whisper down in the area of my gonads, grew rapidly into a shout and overcame me in a flash.

  I turned and ran.

  I took two strides and then I felt stabbing heat-teeth sank into my left buttock even as I distinctly heard a raised voice: “Don’t get too close to that dog, now, ya hear!”

  It was not the first nor the last time I had been bitten by a dog, but for me it forever changed the character of the night.